Re: Fwd: reiser4 non-free?

[Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com>]

Who the hell do you think you are to use market leveraging to force 
developers to use licenses they don't want that leave them exposed to 
dangers that endanger them not you? 

Have you expended 2-3 million dollars and a decade of your life only to 
find yourself 100,000 dollars in debt and returned to having a day job 
to support the other programmers on the project?  Without knowing you, 
somehow I doubt it. Who do you think you are to try to close me off from 
raising money by using the radical notion of publicly thanking those who 
give it?   Frankly, I don't advise anyone to follow my path: sure the 
software works, and people know my name, but the economics are miserable 
and unsuitable for responsible family raising, and reputation does 
little for you if you never have time to socialize.

You are trying to create a new rigid orthodoxy to close off license 
experimentation (long before we have licenses that work well), and like 
most groups who create such orthodoxies, you are eager to oppress those 
who do not conform to things you do not deeply understand.

I hope the FSF sticks to the GFDL and eventually makes GPL V3 resemble 
it.  As long as the FSF docs are debian non-free, debian non-free is not 
going to be something serious in the eyes of most.

Don Armstrong wrote:

>
>It happens even in journals that are not peer reviewed, and merely
>editor reviewed, because it is the way that the broader scientific
>community expects people to behave.
>  
>
There is no such expectation of Linux distros.

>  
>
>>In free software there is no such social mechanism affecting RedHat
>>and preventing them from removing the k from all the kde programs.
>>    
>>
>
>Surely there is! If we (or RedHat) were to do such a thing, our very
>users and developers would be quite vocal about it, and rightly so.
>  
>
They did it and nothing happened to them (except of course that XFree86 
4.0 changed its license, which is the only way developers can 
effectively respond to such conduct).

>  
>
>
>The patch that you're refering to is currently not even applied. What
>it actually did was add a -quiet option to suppress the outputing of
>the DARPA sponsorship message.
>  
>
and what made you think it was your place to do that?

In a democracy, funding programs which are not known by the public to 
have provided much benefit get their funding cut. (When the democracy 
works well, what happens when it does not is off-topic.....)

>Furthermore, the list of credits are still included (to my knowledge)
>in /usr/share/doc/resierfsprogs/README.gz.
>  
>
oh, well, that is almost as good as putting them on the dark side of the 
moon....  a credit read by no one has no meaning.

>  
>
>>What alternative do you offer to ensure that attribution occurs?
>>    
>>
>
>Copyright requires that appropriate attribution occurs.
>
It requires not removing the copyright notice which usually mentions the 
copyright holder is (me), and you know, I don't really fancy changing 
the mount type to "mount -t copyrighthansreiser2001200220032004 /dev/hda 
/home".  Everyone else but me gets completely shafted.

> We follow
>copyright, and almost always follow author and copyright holder
>requests with respect to their work.
>
>  
>
>>the end user is not the issue, I think the current phrasing even
>>defines that the end user can remove them.
>>    
>>
>
>Yes, but in order for the work to be free, the end user must also be
>capable of distributing his or her modifications.
>
>
>Don Armstrong
>
>1: I personally have travelled to meet with individuals at FSF to work
>on bringing the GFDL issue to an amicable conclusion,
>
It isn't your place to force a license on software you did not write.

> and Debian is
>itself comitted to doing it's utmost to bring works to a state where
>they can be freely included in Debian.
>  
>
Well, I hope that we can find some means for being well and effectively 
integrated into the non-free section.  That would make me happy.